Impressions of Opera
Having taken advantage of Opera’s offer (still valid for a few hours!) I must say, I’m impressed. Opera is snappy in a way that Safari (with all the plugins I’ve added) is not. There’s some small bits of things not working as I expect, things that should be controlled differently*, as I move, but there are two big issues that are causing me to consider not moving.
The first is ad management. Safari, by itself, does no better than Opera at this, but Safari has PithHelmet, which does an excellent job of helping me not connect to sites I don’t want to see, and also adds per-site configuration of things like Javascript.
The second is Mac Keychain integration. The Mac has a very nice system for storing and managing passwords, encrypted with your login password, or other password. Opera doesn’t seem to support this. I have literally hundreds of passwords stored in Keychain, and getting them all out and into Opera will be a pain.
It remains to be seen if Opera’s speed is enough to overcome these two hurdles. If anyone has suggestions for either, I’d love to hear them.
[* things that should be controlled differently: One example is skin management: Selecting a radio button for “download new skins” is clear enough, but going and getting new skins should be a different control.]
How does it go with anti-fraud management? Implement any cool ideas to monitor, name and cache SSL keys?
I don’t know. It does come with 40 bit ciphers turned on–I made a stack of changes, and now can’t login to the WSJ. Not sure why, will try to debug later today or tomorrow.
I haven’t seen any cool key persistance, but I haven’t really tried to hit any phishing sites, either.